YEC & Flood Geology

Over this weekend, Steve Hays and I have exchanged some e-mails regarding YEC and flood geology due to some questions Steve was asked by another individual. Since this topic is of great concern to many, we both thought it appropriate to put the points we went over here for everyone to read and comment upon. As such, while this post has my “by-line” it actually contains quite a deal that Steve wrote too.

First, a bit of framework. To define YEC, Steve suggested the following points:

1. The universe is about 6-10K years old.

2. It was made in the span of 6 consecutive calendar days.

3. All the natural kinds originated in the beginning by direct divine
fiat.

4. Microevolution is true, but macroevolution is false.

5. There was no aging, death, disease, extinction, predation, genetic
defects, or parasitism before the Fall.

6. Noah's flood was global in scope.

7. The Flood was largely responsible for the fossil record.

8. The Flood triggered the ice age.

Of these points, Steve affirms 1-4; he affirms 5 with reference to man, but not to the animal kingdom; and is noncommittal on 6-8. I agree with Steve’s assessment of 3-8, but am myself noncommittal on 1 and 2. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I am “agnostic and apathetic” when it comes to the age of the Earth, holding the six-day creation account to be typological/allegorical. This doesn’t mean I rule out a literal six-day timeframe, as it is definitely possible it was a literal six day period (as we currently understand the term “day”) as the foundation of the typology; but it could just as easily have been longer or shorter on my view. I must add, of course, that modern radiometric dating is so full of errors and endless question begging as to make it scientifically impossible to verify the age of the Earth. Thus, although I do not believe the text of Scripture requires us to interpret it as a literal six-day period, science does not require me to view it as anything but a literal six-day period either.

Now there are some problems with both YECists and Darwinists that need to be brought to bear. Many (most?) YEC scientists are not exegetically or Scripturally trained, and therefore often fall into the trap of forcing the text of Scripture to match a specific scientific theory rather than interpreting what the text itself says. This is obviously also a problem for the Darwinist seeking to refute Scripture. In both instances, not understanding what the Scripture actually says leads the scientist to create a false defeater for the Bible. This is most commonly found in Genesis 1-9 and its forced identification with a particular view or scientific construct.

Obviously, this is a problem. For on the one hand, the Bible was not written in scientific jargon. It was written for all people at all times, not for 20th and 21st Century American Scientists. On the other hand, every scientific theory that could account for what we find in Genesis 1-9 is (at best) underdetermined by the evidence. As such, it is simply erroneous to place any particular scientific construction on the Bible. It’s a principled mistake (exegetically/philosophically speaking), and it’s also a tactical mistake (apologetically speaking).

Furthermore, there are far fewer (and less talented) YEC scientists then there are secular scientists. It puts the YEC view at a considerable disadvantage when dealing with the scientific establishment, with its enormous resources so often subsidized by taxpayers (and therefore, by the YEC scientists too!). This is no reason to think they are wrong, of course. In fact, it’s striking how well YECs do despite the tilted, biased playing field.

But before we lump too much criticism on the YEC position from the start, it should also be noted that Darwinists have their own problems. Many times, they are simply far from honest and play rather loose with the “facts” they hold to. For a quick example, Dawkins made the claim:

Far from being missing, the fossil links between modern humans and our ape ancestors now constitute an elegantly continuous series.

This claim, however, has been thoroughly discredited by Gee. We don’t have anything approaching a continuous series in the fossil record. Rather, radical discontinuity is the norm.

In any case, let us now look specifically at flood geology as it relates to the debate on evolution (strictly speaking, Darwinian evolution—I shall herein use the terms synonymously). One of the big problems is that Christians can often become over reliant on flood geology to counter evolution. Flood geology doesn't really serve to "counter" evolution, though, because it doesn't strike at the heart of the theory. This is because in the end the fossil record really isn't relevant to the evolutionist since he will see what he wants to see in the fossil record. As pointed out above, the record doesn't show anything near a continuous series, and yet the evolutionist has no problem "filling in the blanks" in an ad hoc fashion and claiming success. As a result, to defeat Darwinism one doesn't need to engage in flood geology at all; one simply needs to point out at the Darwinist is over-extending and, as such, is completely unscientific.

Part of this over-extension stems from the fact that Darwinists really don't hold their belief in Darwinism due to the fossil record in the first place, so removing the fossil record doesn’t challenge their position. This can be most obviously demonstrated by the fact that Darwin himself didn't have an adequate fossil record, as he himself acknowledged, yet still held to the theory. The hope would be that the future would vindicate him. In my opinion, Darwinism is based on an overriding materialistic philosophy first, and the fossil record is ultimately just "crammed in" to buttress an already unwavering conclusion. Removing the fossil record from the equation doesn't remove the controlling philosophy. The Darwinist can still revert to, "We'll discover more finds in the future that will prove evolution right."

Secondly, proving that there was a flood does not prove the Bible correct anyway. It just proves there was a flood. The evolutionist can incorporate catastrophic worldwide events into his theory too (e.g. the theorized meteor that ended the dinosaurs). So flood geology not only isn't a silver bullet, but is (in discussions with Darwinists) merely a rubber bullet.

Of course, that doesn't mean flood geology isn't a worthwhile endeavor for other reasons, such as seeking to validate the book of Genesis, etc. (although that would again require a proper understanding of Genesis in the first place).

But the Christian actually faces another problem. One of the ironies of flood geology is the degree to which it reads the fossil record in the same way a Darwinian would. It seems to concede that the fossil record looks evolutionary. That the fossil record presents an evolutionary appearance. And we need flood geology to furnish an alternative explanation.

By becoming so reliant on flood geology, we stop asking ourselves whether the fossil record, taken by itself, actually does present an evolutionary appearance. Indeed, we don’t even question whether it is possible in the first place for a Darwinist to demonstrate appearance. After all, according to modern theory, evolution takes very long to occur and making fossils is a statistical long shot. Thus, how is it possible for an evolutionist to actually say what the fossil record "should" look like given the truth of Evolution? On what basis can he make this claim? It cannot be empirically, for there is nothing in the lab that he can do to recreate something that takes millions of years and is completely random. If the idea is not made empirically, then how exactly is it made?

Surrendering these questions, we stop asking ourselves what the fossil record would look like without flood geology. We cease to question the operating assumptions that gave rise to flood geology in the first place. In essence, we let the Darwinists off the hook—allowing them to never explain why the fossil record needs to be “refuted” by Creationists when it isn’t even theirs (the Darwinists) to begin with! Why should we take so much for granted? How much of the fossil record do we really need to explain? We need to assume less and question more.

On a related note, I think that YECs cause unnecessary trouble for themselves by trying to make flood geology explain too much. Explain more than it reasonably can. Once again, this is not an attack on flood geology as a research program. But flood geology would be more plausible if it were less ambitious.

In what sense does the geological column seem to support evolution? It’s based on the principle of faunal succession, which, in turn, presupposes the principle of superposition. The fossil sequence supposedly represents a chronological sequence. What’s lower is older. For example, Ernst Mayr has a chart which presents the following fossil sequence, in ascending chronological order:

First bacteria
First multicellular organisms
First shelled organisms
First fish with jaws
First land plants
First insects
First amphibians
First reptiles
First mammal-like reptiles
First dinosaurs
First mammals
First birds
First placental mammals
Extinction of dinosaurs
First horses
First whales
First apes
Earliest Homo

(What Evolution Is, Basic Books 2001, p. 20).

Actually, if you go from the chart to the body of the text, the sequence, or basis thereof, isn’t that clear or consistent:

Multicellularity originated repeatedly during evolution (ibid. 49).

Birds/mammals, Upper Triassic, 224 million years ago (ibid. 61).

The fossil record of the earliest plants is very poor (ibid. 63).

The fossil record of the earliest vertebrates is rather poor (ibid. 64).

The earliest undisputed bird fossil is Archaeopteryx, found in the upper Jurassic (145 million years ago) (ibid. 65).

Now, why would anyone think that this is evidence for evolution? It appears there are two basic, interrelated reasons:

i) We have an order of ascending complexity

ii) We have a chronological order, over vast stretches of time.

What are we to make of the first line of evidence?

a) In what sense is one organism simpler than another? For example, many animals have more sophisticated sensory organs than we (humans) do. Moreover, many animals have sophisticated organs which we simply lack. Furthermore, there may be a tradeoff between one form of specialization and another. So to say that one organism is more complex than another is a complicated and frequently equivocal comparative judgment.

b) Related to this, is higher complexity better than lower complexity in the first place? Gould, for instance, seemed to disagree in Full House, arguing that in his opinion bacteria were the "best" evolved organisms under Darwinism.

Obviously, when we ask which organism can live in the most extreme environments, the answer is: bacteria. We've found bacteria in Antarctica and bacteria in lava flows. They're hardy little creatures. Since evolution is about the perpetuation of genes, nothing does it better than bacteria do!

As a result, higher-complex species are at a disadvantage. Put a lion in the artic, it'll die. Put a polar bear in the Sahara, it'll die. And considering Global Warming...if all the "complex" animals die off, bacteria still almost certainly won't. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, where we are dealing with Survival of the Fittest, complexity isn't "better" in the least.

Complexity, in fact, seems to create a disadvantage for the species. The more complex a species is, the more it is tied to a specific climate region, reducing its survivability chances. This would lead me to believe that natural selection ought to select against complexity rather than for it, something that is directly contrary to the evolutionist's own claims of what the fossil record says.

c) Why is one organism simpler than another? Well, one obvious reason is size. A big animal will be a multicellular animal. That automatically makes it more complex than a unicellular organism. But size is sometimes related to habitat. A marine or semi-aquatic species can be bigger than a land animal because the water supports its weight.

d) Of course, size doesn’t always correlate with complexity. For instance, it is sometimes possible for "simple DNA commands" to result in a huge organism. Using a mathematical illustration:

2^4 = 16

is "smaller" than

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16

is "smaller" than

2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 16

is "smaller" than

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 16

If all we could see is the answer, we'd say each "organism" in the above is equally complex: 16. But seeing the "code" that went into it makes it a little more complicated. (After all, is it more complex to learn about powers, such as 2^4, than it is to multiply, and is multiplication more complex than addition? Or is it just the case that size = complexity, and therefore 2^4 is less complex than 2 x 2 x 2 x 2?)

Now the reason this is important is because of fossils and DNA. Fossils do not save DNA (except in extremely rare circumstances, such as amber fossils). DNA works like the mathematical formulas above and the organism’s physical structure is the "result." We can only compare “results” of the organisms. It tells us nothing about the formulas used to produce that result.

Simply because one fossil is bigger than another does not mean it is more complex. Indeed, without access to DNA it is impossible to state whether the DNA of one fossil is more complex than another fossil.

e) In sum, you can’t chart a linear progression from simplicity to complexity in the fossil record. At best, we have the trend that bigger = more complex. But that just leaves us with a trend from simplicity to complexity with many exceptions and parallel developments, as well as outright reversals. The famous “horse progression” is one such example. The idea that horses evolved from small, dog-sized organisms into the horse-sized equus of today in a stepwise manner is simply false. For instance, we read:

There was a time when the existing fossils of the horses seemed to indicate a straight-line evolution from small to large, from dog-like to horse-like, from animals with simple grinding teeth to animals with the complicated cusps of the modern horse. It looked straight-line—like the links of a chain. But not for long. As more fossils were uncovered, the chain splayed out into the usual phylogenetic net, and it was all too apparent that evolution had not been in a straight line at all, but that (to consider size only) horses had now grown taller, now shorter with the passage of time.

(Hardin, Garrett. Nature and Man’s Fate. Mentor, NY, 1961)

Thus, the first line of reasoning as to why the fossil record needs to be addressed (“We have an order of ascending complexity”) is shown to be more bluster than substance.
What of the second line then? “We have a chronological order, over vast stretches of time.”

According to the law of superposition, what is lower is earlier. And there’s no particular reason to challenge that basic principle. However, it’s ambiguous in certain key respects:

a) There can be a difference between the time in which the organisms existed, and the time in which they were deposited. Take the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. The effect was to layer some remains on top of other remains. But the level they occupy doesn’t represent their original distribution.

b) By itself, the geological column doesn’t tell you how long it took to lay down the column. Dating the column isn’t based on relative sequencing alone. In fact, fossil-bearing rocks are almost always dated by the fossils they carry (thus introducing a bit of circularity to the equation).

For example:

Biostratigraphy is the study of the temporal and spatial distribution of fossil organisms. The limited stratigraphic range of many fossil taxa is used for correlation, typically by means of biozonation schemes (i.e. intervals characterized by a species or group of species). When interpolated with numerical age information derived from radiometric dating, biozones and the divisions of the geological time scale containing biozones (periods, epochs, stages, etc.) can be given chronological values, a process sometimes referred to as biochronology.

As noted above, biostratigraphy and geochronology are fundamental building blocks of many wider-ranging geoscience studies. They provide the common language of geology, which enables the dating and correlation of rocks, whether this is at a global scale, between basins, within a basin or within an oil field. They provide an understanding of the duration and periodicity of geological events (e.g. the rate of sediment accumulation) and the framework to study the process of evolution. Biostratigraphy and geochronology are fundamental aspects of all geological training programs in education.

If biostratigraphy and geochronology can be said to underpin geology, then taxonomy can be said to underpin biostratigraphy. An essential prerequisite of any biostratigraphic study is a good taxonomic understanding of the fossils involved (Cope, 1993; Loydell, 1993; Simmons & Lowe, 1996) Biostratigraphy can only be as good as the taxonomy on which it is built.

The advent of sequence stratigraphy has had a major impetus in furthering biostratigraphic studies (Simmons & Williams, 1992; Armentrout, 1996; Emery & Myers, 1996). This is for two reasons. Firstly, the framework of sequence stratigraphy is time. Essentially this means that sequence stratigraphic studies require a biostratigraphic framework in which to place the organization of sequence boundaries, maximum flooding surfaces and systems tracts.

(BTW, the whole article is worth reading.)

c) The age of rock formations is biased toward a uniformitarian position; however, science is now beginning to lean toward catastrophicism. Thus, despite widely changing climates, ice ages, continents tearing apart, oceans advancing & retreating, etc., the geologic column yields an average of about 0.2 mm of deposit per year, in all the various time periods (e.g. The Cretaceous period lasted 65 million years and is 15 kilometers thick, for an average of 0.23mm/year; the Carboniferous period lasted 65 million years and is 14 kilometers thick, for an average of 0.21mm/year).

Add on top of this the fact that we know there are portions of the Earth today where deposits are more rapid than other places (for instance, river deltas), and further add on the fact that 0.2 mm of deposit per year is simply not enough to make any fossils, and the uniform 0.2mm/year seems to be too much of a good thing. Our weather systems alone are too large and chaotic to allow for such uniformity. Our world is very obviously more catastrophic, swinging between periods of relative stability to massive change.

Indeed, this is found in the organisms discovered in the fossil record themselves according to modern catastrophicist evolutionists. It is part of the reason that Gould proposed punctuated equilibrium. Ironically, though he saw that the fossil organisms were chaotic in this way, he never doubted the ages given for the sediments the fossils were found in, despite the fact that these very ages were dependent upon uniformitarian, not catastrophic, principals! I find it highly unlikely that organisms themselves should demonstrate long periods of stability followed by brief chaos while the rocks they are found in show only uniformitarian progression. This seems to be a contradiction any way you look at it.

d) Another problem is what can be called the paradox of geological time. On the one hand, the geological time-scales are a large part of what makes the fossil sequence seem to present an evolutionary trajectory from “primitive” organisms or “advanced” organisms. That’s the underlying reason that we would equate a simple organism with a primitive organism, and a complex organism with an advanced organism. Remove the timetable, and the aspect of an age-long progression disappears.

On the other hand, the more time you assign to the geological record, the more spacing you place between one fossil find and another. Extant fossils are separated from one another by vast stretches of time. A conjectural string thousands of miles long for every isolated, concrete pearl.

That makes it impossible to infer lineal descent. But if you can’t infer lineal descent, then how can you infer common descent?

Now let’s consider the alternative position. Suppose the earth really is a few thousand years old rather than a few billion years old. Under that assumption, when we see faunal succession in a slice of geological strata, what are we seeing?

Suppose we put this question to the Darwinian. If he thought the geological column was 6000 years old, would he still see the origin and evolution of life unfolding before his eyes? Does he think you could go from no life to microbes to mammals in just 6000 years or so? Of course not!

Which brings me to another point: the scientific evidence for the antiquity of the universe is generally treated as one of the biggest problems for YEC. And it is a problem in the sense that YEC must come up with reasonable counterarguments to blunt the arguments for conventional dating schemes.

However, this cuts both ways. Indeed, it cuts deeper into evolution. For evolutionary theory is quite dependent on geological time-scales. Misdating alone can break the back of evolution if the values are off by several orders of magnitude.

If you go back to Mayr’s chart and strip away the temporal scaffolding, what pattern do you see? Instead of temporal distribution, you can also see a fundamentally spatial distribution. It resembles the biogeography of life at present. At or near the bottom are marine species. Above that are semi-aquatic species. Above that are land animals.

There are a few dislocations, but that’s the general pattern. So is the pattern horizontal through time, or vertical through space (i.e. stratified ecological zones)? Frozen in place because that represents their original placement.

When a Darwinian looks at the fossil record, he mentally inverts it from a vertical, spatial order to a horizontal, temporal order. But why couldn’t it be like a snapshot in space rather than time? A snapshot of the present, rather than the past?

This wouldn’t be to deny it is a record of the past. Rather, the point is that the column resembles the present. More synchronic than diachronic. If you could take a cross-section of biogeography here and now, it would bear a striking resemblance to faunal succession in the fossil record.

Of course, that oversimplifies the pattern. But there are various ways of accounting for the real or apparent discontinuities. And flood geology may be one such way.